Yunchtime

Solstice is the shortest day

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of year. It was a rainy day, with temperatures as high as 60 degrees Fahrenheit here in New England.

Global warming, being the long term rise of temperatures, is happening simultaneously with anthropogenic climate change (as any idiot knows), and today we surely felt it!

On the one hand, you have to appreciate how really strange it is for the shortest day of the year to feel just like early summer. On the other hand, with various obstacles, problems, and worries piled up to the skies, you have to wonder how so much trouble can pack itself into such a short period of time!

Not that there is any point in trying to keep up with the daily cycle of madness, but now even Mad Dog Mattis has resigned and stormed out of the White House in disgust. The irony is compounded by the fact that he was largely responding to Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. Military out of Syria.

Can you believe it?

Here I am, having protested so many of the U.S. military adventures – built on lies and dirty geopolitical deals with drug lords and tyrants, as most of them are – thinking that it has to be good thing to get us the hell out of Syria and Afghanistan. But at the same time, Trump seems to have taken the decision while on the phone with Erdogan: agreeing with Erdogan’s demand to get our troops out of there. In other words, I actually agreed with Trump’s decision, but not the reason why he made it. Similarly, I can’t stand Mattis or any of his professional instrumentalist types, who are basically the architects of the U.S. hegemonic empire. And yet, I sort of feel sympathy for him, because he is forced to watch as a reckless lunatic throws U.S. foreign policy into a spiral of total chaos.

And speaking of Foreign Policy, that miserable rag of geopolitical balderdash posing as a journal, they recently published a piece on why China’s Social Credit Score Isn’t Real. This sort of rubbish is what we expect of Doublespeak. So there you have it! We are truly in a post-truth world. It no longer matters if you just say the sky is red and the sea is yellow. Nothing makes sense, and nobody has any handle on reality at this point.

Which you’d think is a sort of perilous state to be in, and yet…

This is the thunder within the earth, as the I-Ching phrases it, or Alban Arthan for the druids. The time of little sun, of energy drawn down to the roots and hibernating among the rocks and stones. But it is the moment when the rebirth happens, when the tide turns, and new sparks are struck!

The way out is the way forward is the stillness and the unknowing. When things get this weird, the weird turn pro. Keep the faith! Light the signal fires! Sing the ever-changing anthem of being alive in the midst of chaos. Same as it ever was.